Posted on 03/20/2010 9:03:41 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The worlds largest particle accelerator is feeling its oats. Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
CERN Operations Group leader Mike Lamont (foreground) and LHC engineer in charge Alick Macpherson in the CERN Control Centre this morning. Photo: M. Brice / CERN. More photos »
Geneva, 19 March 2010. At just after 5:20 this morning, two 3.5 TeV proton beams successfully circulated in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. This is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator, and an important step on the way to the start of the LHC research programme.
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Well, if the world ends in 2012, no one can blame it on the super-collider.
*beep-beep*
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